The Twentieth Man

by Tony Jones

  ‘Nothing. Not a word. He’s gone. It’s down to you.’

  ‘You’re the same like them.’

  ‘Not even remotely, mate.’ Moriarty waved the bottle at him, clearly drunk now. ‘They always have someone w-watching over their shoulder, some c-colonel or c-commissar. I’m here on my own r-r-recognisance, lone wolf or whatever. So don’t fuck with me!’

  He threw his head back, downed the rest of the bottle and dropped it clinking into the pocket with the others. He pulled the gun from Katich’s head and pressed it against the man’s left knee.

  ‘Anyway, jolly good for you. You’re talking at least, so we’ll ch-change the st-stakes. Off the head; on to the knee.’ Moriarty was slurring words. ‘But you’re still bullshitting me. So, one last ch-chance. Give me the names of those two blokes.’

  ‘I told you I don’t …’

  Moriarty pulled the trigger.

  CLICK.

  ‘Fuck, fuck!’ Katich cried.

  ‘Oooo, lucky, lucky, luckeee.’ Moriarty almost sang the words. ‘Still walking. For now. So, one last chance. Who are those two blokes? Start with the big one.’

  Ivo Katich’s face was deathly pale, save for the line of blood running down his forehead. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. He started talking.

  ‘They’re from out of town. The big one, that’s Kavran. Blaz Kavran. He’s from Canberra, but his network is Melbourne. The other is Matic. Simo. He’s a Melbourne guy.’

  ‘Better, that’s better.’

  ‘Maybe they did bombing, maybe not,’ Katich went on. ‘They are madmen and liars. From me, they want money, weapons. Want me to sing praises for them. I want nothing to do with them.’

  ‘These cr-creeps don’t do anything without your s-say so.’

  ‘That’s not true. Not anymore. Since Bosnia, the young ones have taken over.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Listen to me, Tom. Listen. Open drawer.’ Katich gestured to the bedside table. ‘Yes, that one. There’s black book inside.’

  Moriarty found the book. ‘What about it?’

  ‘Inside the first page. There’s a number at the top. See it?’

  Moriarty looked at the number.

  ‘Ring that one number,’ Katich said. ‘You know him. He will tell you. Leave Katich alone. He will tell you.’

  Moriarty stared at Katich and back at the book. Time to go. He knew the number very well.

  5.

  The lift doors started to open, then stopped halfway, shuddering with indecision. Then an arm pulled the inner safety doors open and attempted to prise the outer doors. With a terrible sigh they parted, revealing a dark-eyed, irritated-looking woman.

  Anna Rosen had been on the road all day. After the Murphy interview her flight from Canberra had been delayed. She’d had nothing to eat but a stale ham roll and a bag of chicken chips. Her slim frame was weighed down on one side by a Nagra tape recorder and on the other by an overstuffed leather bag. Adjusting the burdens on her shoulders, she stepped through the still-quivering doors and into the late-evening gloom of the vinyl-tiled corridor, avoiding the worn patches that had tripped her up before. Maintenance was not high on the priority list of the cash-strapped broadcaster, and this floor, where the studios were located, resembled the lower decks of a decommissioned warship.

  Anna didn’t care. Fading glamour had its own appeal. After eighteen months she still hadn’t come down from the high of being chosen as a trainee reporter. Only recently had her vague uneasiness—the sense of being an intruder in an exclusive club—begun to dissipate. Tonight she really felt she belonged here.

  As she moved almost robotically through the maze of empty studios, her mind was preoccupied with the new information she’d picked up throughout this long Sunday. When Anna finally reached her office, she shut the door with a flick of her backside, and set down her tape recorder and bag.

  Inside she was surrounded by ranks of battleship-grey filing cabinets and bookcases filled with reference and history books. On the floor around her desk were piles of specialist works, bearing the stamp of the Fisher Stack, at Sydney Uni, which would give a visitor the impression she was preparing a thesis on Balkan history. All of them were months overdue and somewhere on the overflowing desk was an increasingly desperate series of letters from the library demanding their return.

  From the bottom drawer of one cabinet she pulled out a fat folder, opened it on the desk and took out her makings: a packet of ready-rolled tobacco, cigarette papers and a plastic bag of weed. She pulled out two papers, licked the side of one and stuck them together. Then she took a pinch of tobacco and a larger ball of the resinous grass, mulched the two piles together. She deftly rolled a thin joint, before licking the adhesive. She ripped a narrow strip from the Tally-Ho packet and made a filter from it, tamping it in.

  Finally, flicking open her stainless-steel lighter, she fired up the joint. Seeds crackled as she drew deep and waited for the THC to hit her bloodstream, which it did quickly. She had figured out years ago, through trial and error, that working stoned—well, slightly stoned, at least—was not a hindrance to her concentration. Rather it enhanced it.

  Now she unpacked the contents of the leather bag on to her desk: marked-up tapes in their boxes and notebooks and pens and a folder of news clippings, along with crumpled sticks of chewing gum and … Yes, yes, yes! A full packet of Maltesers. She put a small handful into her mouth and sucked on them gratefully as she took from the top drawer a thin square box marked: The Ustasha Files—Edit Master 1.

  From the box she removed the large tape and fitted the spool on to the Tandberg editing machine on her desk. Next to her, on a metal bench on wheels, sat a second Tandberg, and on the workspace beside it she piled the boxes containing the new taped interviews from her trips to Melbourne and Canberra.

  Swivelling back to the machine, Anna pulled out the edge of the tape on the edit master and threaded it in a pattern over the sprockets and heads and through to the empty spool on the other side.

  She pulled the lever into play and, as the tape ran across the heads, she heard her own voice, recorded in a sound booth, coming loudly from the speaker:

  ‘Tonight on Agenda we ask: Is Australia home to an organised right-wing terrorist group known as the Ustasha?’

  She hit Stop.

  ‘No doubt about it. As I will now prove to you, dear listeners …’ Anna paused and laughed. ‘Who are you speaking to, girl? Get a grip!’ She laughed again. ‘That’s enough of you,’ she told the joint as she ground it out in the ashtray.

  Anna loved the simple craft of cut editing. For a person like her, with an impractical mind and few manual skills, it was a soothing discipline. The broadcaster’s conservative enemies liked to refer to the ‘basket weavers’ in the backrooms of the ABC and she was happy enough with that metaphor. How could the bastards know that the work itself really was a form of therapy?

  Anna sorted through the smaller boxed tapes until she found the one labelled Lionel Murphy Sunday 17/9/72, opened it and fitted the tape on to the second Tandberg, spooling through it until she found the shadow attorney-general’s answer to the rhetorical question she had posed at the beginning of the documentary.

  She cut out his answer from the interview and draped the long strand of tape that held it around her shoulders while she cut it into the master reel, securing the edits with adhesive tape.

  ‘There is ample evidence of well-organised terrorist activity for those who wish to act on it, but the government is sympathetic to this group, no matter what it does, because it is anti-communist. Yesterday in the centre of Sydney we saw the fourteenth bomb explosion in Australia by the Ustasha criminal movement. How many more are they going to get away with?’

  She knew her instincts were right. It was a powerful way to start. But now she needed the government response. She consulted her interview notes for the attorney-general, lined up the Ivor Greenwood tape and played the grab:

  ‘As to whether or
not I still maintain that there is no Ustasha terrorist movement in Australia, I stated in July that intensive police investigations had revealed no credible evidence that such a terrorist organisation existed. As far as the incidents on Saturday are concerned, one must surely await the outcome of these police investigations before expressing any judgement.’

  Anna shook her head. It was still incredible to hear it. Two bombs explode on a Saturday morning in the heart of your biggest city and that was not ‘credible evidence’? Surely no one was going to buy that line now. The attorney-general repeating it after such an outrage sounded at best deluded, at worst like he was covering something up.

  She put together three sheets of A4 with two of carbon paper, rolled the bunched pages into the typewriter and began rewriting the script. As she did she shuttled back and forth through the new taped material, consulting her notes. She had to re-edit the beginning of the master tape, incorporating the news of yesterday’s bombings and analysis of the implications.

  The program’s researcher had left tapes of actuality recorded by reporters in George Street and Anna cut together a sound montage from this material:

  Policeman on loudhailer: ‘There is a live bomb in the street! Everyone except emergency workers must move immediately behind the police barricades. I repeat: there is a live bomb in the street.’

  Witness 1: ‘We’d ordered lunch when the bomb went off. There was a bar along the wall—it just disappeared in flames.’

  Witness 2: ‘There was blood everywhere. People were lying around bleeding—it was terrible.’

  Witness 3: ‘The proprietor came into the shop and walked over near the door where the bomb was. His legs just disappeared.’

  Witness 4: ‘There was smoke everywhere—the ceiling had come down. I saw my brother lying there on the floor. He had lost his right leg—it was blown off at the knee.’

  As she’d expected, the raw eyewitness accounts of blood and smoke and flames, of severed limbs and prone bodies, immediately rendered the attorney-general’s lame, legalistic rhetoric incomprehensible. Surely any listener would be asking: Where’s his sense of outrage? Where’s his angry determination to track down the terrorists, no matter who they turned out to be? Why this pig-headed determination to claim there is no evidence of a terrorist organisation?

  Anna turned to the document that had only come into her possession today. As she read it carefully, she began to regret that she had not had it before her interview with Attorney-General Greenwood because it completely undermined his repeated statements that ‘intensive police investigations had revealed no credible evidence’ of the existence of a Croatian Ustasha terrorist movement. The document was a memo from the Commonwealth Police Central Crime Intelligence Bureau sent to the attorney-general in July. It detailed more than fifty serious incidents in Australia over nine years, including bombings, murders and assassinations. The memo stated the belief that these violent incidents were planned and carried out by Ustasha-controlled organisations.

  Anna began scripting quotes from the leaked memo into the top of the documentary. She had a long night ahead of her, but she felt a sense of elation.

  Al Sharp felt a prod on his shoulder.

  ‘Can you shift down the back, mate? You’re in my way there.’

  The irritated voice belonged to Nigel Daltrey, a small, thin man who moved around the dark, narrow van the three of them shared like a twitchy guinea pig in its burrow. Sharp felt oversized in here. He lifted his big arse off the bolted-down metal chair, stood and bent over.

  ‘Sorry about that.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry—be gone.’

  Sharp did a dance around Daltrey, trying to change places without hugging him. He winced at a twinge in his back, the old injury still playing up. He resolved to ignore the little man’s insubordination.

  He could’ve been a dickhead and pulled rank, but he needed to get on with these blokes. There weren’t too many electronics specialists in the CIB and it looked like he was going to end up spending a lot of time with the pair of them in this cramped tin box on wheels.

  ‘Over here, Mr Sharp,’ said the other man, indicating a chair on his side of the van, in front of the bank of tape recorders. ‘There’s more room here while we’re working.’

  ‘Thanks, Bob.’

  If Daltrey was like a guinea pig, Bob McCafferty was a bear moving with ease inside his cave. McCafferty was polite without being welcoming. These two odd creatures were used to occupying the same small space, but Sharp was an intruder. He’d only met them a few hours ago. Now they were under his orders and it didn’t sit well with them.

  Their task was to bug the upstairs room of the Hrvatska Restoran, which was straight across the road from where they were parked, and tap its phone. The room was the regular meeting place for the leaders of the two most radical Croatian groups and where they came together to plan joint actions. Sharp had brought that particular piece of intelligence to the investigation.

  He watched Daltrey wire up a listening device to a transmitter and prepare the bank of batteries to charge it. The man worked with an agitated, obsessive intensity, twitching as he did so.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘This shit’s so old, it’s falling apart.’

  ‘Maybe they’ll give us a proper budget for this op,’ McCafferty said, turning to Sharp. ‘We get some new equipment? What do you think, Mr Sharp?’

  ‘Give me a list of what you need,’ said Sharp. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  Daltrey snorted. He’d heard shit like that before.

  ‘I’ll take two of these in with me, Bob. Christ knows where we’ll put them. A bloody restaurant, never easy.’

  ‘You’ll find somewhere,’ McCafferty replied in soft, measured tones. ‘I’ll give you that list, Mr Sharp.’

  ‘Call me Al.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Daltrey. ‘We’re all just mates.’

  McCafferty stared daggers at his partner. ‘Give it a break, Roger!’

  Sharp looked up, confused for a moment until he recalled Nigel Daltrey’s nickname. One of the smart-arse detectives had dubbed him ‘Roger’, after the lead singer of The Who, and it had stuck. An ironic jibe, no doubt, but Daltrey really did resemble the stuttering rock star.

  Sharp knew that the troglodyte wing of the NSW coppers, especially the old-guard detectives, had a deep distrust of these technical bods. They hated all the other smarties too, including people like Sharp who might have been to uni or whatever, and so were completely up themselves—wankers and poofs, barely a rung up the ladder from the student trash they’d obviously mixed with.

  The head of the Special Breaking Squad, Jim Kelly, had given Sharp pen portraits of the two men he’d be working with.

  Daltrey: A bit of a genius, but a maddy who has issues with authority. (‘He might give you a bit of trouble. Let me know if he does.’)

  McCafferty: A big kid who reads comic books and technical magazines, and is most likely a poofter. (‘He’s good at his job, though, I’ll say that for Bob McCafferty. The best bugger in the force.’)

  Kelly had grinned at his own wit.

  Sharp put such thoughts aside and returned to practical matters. The two buggers wore Post Master General uniforms to avert suspicion and he could see that they had already erected a PMG tent around the junction box. It was close to the entrance to the restaurant.

  ‘How hard is the phone going to be?’ he asked McCafferty, whose job it was to tap the line.

  ‘I think I’ve got the pairs for that number,’ McCafferty replied. ‘But it would help if you could find the phone when you go in there and talk on the line, just so’s I know for sure.’

  Sharp knew the drill. McCafferty had attached alligator clips to the two wires he believed serviced the phone; when Sharp said a few words on that line, McCafferty would listen through a set of headphones to confirm he had the right ones. Then he’d connect that pair of wires to a transmitter, which would send the signal back to the tape recorder in the van, and Bob’s
your uncle. The trick was to find a place nearby to park the van for long periods, concealed from the targets.

  ‘I can do that,’ said Sharp.

  Daltrey suddenly looked up from his fiddly work. ‘Fuckin’ Manly, eh! Didn’t deserve to win. That fuckin’ Keith Page is a deadset crook. We should be tapping his phone.’

  McCafferty groaned. ‘Come off it, Roger, you can’t blame the ref.’

  ‘Two fuckin’ Easts tries disallowed. Manly awarded two dodgy tries. Do the maths. You don’t have to be Hercule-fuckin’-Poirot. The fix was in.’ Daltrey turned to Sharp. ‘What do you reckon, mate? We get a warrant to do Page’s phone?’

  Sharp smiled, pleased to be included. ‘If you can establish a link between Keith Page and the bombings we might be able to swing it without a warrant.’

  Daltrey winked at him. ‘Like this job, eh?’

  ‘Yup,’ said Sharp. ‘Off the books.’

  ‘Well, mate.’ Daltrey smacked both hands on the metal workbench. ‘It’s fuckin’ obvious, isn’t it? The bombings were a diversion. Fixing the grand final—that was the main game.’

  Sharp nodded. ‘You might be on to something, Roger. You just might be.’

  When the devices were ready Sharp and Daltrey went around to the back of the restaurant, using a small torch to light their way between the ranks of over-full garbage bins in the rear lane. When the torch beam picked out rats gnawing through rubbish bags, the rodents swiftly flitted away.

  Daltrey scampered up a short set of stairs and crouched before the back service door. Lock-picking was another of his talents and he made short work of this one. They were inside in moments, quietly closing the door behind them.

  ‘No alarm,’ Daltrey whispered. ‘Your bloke was right about that.’

  Sharp had a mental map of the layout based on the briefing he’d received from his informant. They went through the kitchen, out a door, around a long counter and into the main dining room. It was full of tables, with upturned chairs on top of them. They moved carefully through this obstacle course to the staircase at the side of the room.